Overview

pNok Nok Labs™(Nok Nok) is a privately held software company that helps organizations transform their consumer authentication experience powered by a proven, cost-effective, standards-based authentication solution with the broadest adoption in the market. Nok Nok has solved the connected consumer authentication problem so “You Know Who’s There”. Organizations that use Nok Nok’s solutions improve consumption of their digital services and lower operational costs while reducing fraud, and other security risks. Founded in Palo Alto, CA in 2012, Nok Nok owns an extensive US and global patent portfolio./p

Supernova Award Category

Digital Safety, Governance, Privacy, and Cybersecurity

The Problem

pOn the internet everything authenticates. Legacy authentication methods such as usernames and passwords were not designed for the digital world we live in today.  As a result, cybercrime is rampant, users are frustrated and companies are challenged with meeting the increasing regulatory demands to protect users and their own data.  In 2014, Nok Nok recognized that if we don’t solve the authentication problem, the convenience and safety of a digital world is at risk. Ultimately, the cost associated with lost and reset passwords, fraud and other cybersecurity threats would continue to rise, and organizations and consumers alike would pay the price. As security concerns among global organizations rise, so too does the need to meet global regulations like PSD2 and GDPR.  The demand for passwordless, secure, scalable methods to authenticate users and devices that are privacy preserving and interoperable with existing security environments needed to be addressed./p

The Solution

pNok Nok invented the FIDO authentication protocol,which leverages public key cryptography,and then founded the FIDO Alliance with 5 other companies. With the FIDO protocol,users no longer need passwords and can instead leverage the authenticators on a device via modalities like fingerprint,facial recognition,iris scanning,etc. Since the biometric template is stored securely in the authenticator and no private information is stored on the server, scalable attacks are removed. With FIDO, based on a cryptographic challenge response protocol, phishing and man-in-the-middle attacks are no longer possible. Over the years, Nok Nok helped evangelize the FIDO protocol across the ecosystem, played a leading role in defining the specification,and developed the S3 Authentication Suite. FIDO is now a global standard, and the Nok Nok next-generation authentication solution is used by over 40 companies across the globe with over 150M users securely and conveniently authenticating with our solution./p

The results

pAs the founder of FIDO, and with the most widely deployed FIDO solution in the market, Nok Nok has transformed the consumer and device authentication experience.  We have solved the connected consumer authentication problem. In today’s landscape of more than 1.9 billion stolen passwords and 81% of hacking related breaches leverage either stolen and/or weak passwords, the Nok Nok S3 Suite provides crucial support for strong authentication by using public key cryptography instead of relying on passwords that need to be stored by and sent to the relying party.  The Nok Nok S3 Suite provides an easy way to deploy multi factor authentication that is in line with NIST SP 800-63 AAL 2 and AAL 3 requirements, as well as the European PSD2 strong customer authentication requirements./p p /p pNok Nok empowers business leaders to improve their users’ experience to access digital services and devices, while meeting the most advanced security and regulatory requirements. Customers include cloud, mobile and IoT businesses across multiple industries worldwide./p

Metrics

pNok Nok’s customers can now provide simple and secure authentication to any of their services by leveraging the biometrics on any device.  Sample results include:/p ul listrongIntuit/strong experienced a dramatically improved user experience with 6% increase in authentication success (when moving the needle 1% for them is very difficult!) and 20% faster authentication speed.  They also had 100% onboarding success./li listrongT-Mobile/strong experienced a 60% reduction in password resets in first 3 months, and had adoption by 50% of their target users in the first 5 months./li listrongNTT DOCOMO/strong increased their digital services by leveraging our strong authentication to gain the confidence of their subscribers and 3rd party service providers, and now offers their users carrier billing to over 700 relying parties./li listrongMinSheng Bank/strong -  Increased authentication success rate from 80% to 92%, because there is no SMS timeout, no input inconvenience, 30% increase in authentication speed, reduced SMS costs saving more than 2.9M USD annually, and reduced operational costs of a home grown solution by 65%./li listrongBBVA/strong is launching our solution in Q3 to meet PSD2 requirements in Europe./li /ul

The Technology

pNok Nok delivers the S3 Suite that addresses the broadest set of use cases. This includes any channel (mobile web app, pc web app, etc), providing a consistent and secure user experience. The Nok Nok platform is offered in the form of on-premise software, Cloud service and SDKs. Nok Nok has the innovation backed by an extensive US and global patent portfolio, the expertise as the inventor of FIDO, and market leadership with the largest number of FIDO authenticated users worldwide./p

Disruptive Factor

pIt was a challenging journey to convince organizations to adopt a new approach to consumer authentication -- competitors are only 1 click away.  It requires alignment across many stakeholders including security, compliance, IT, customer experience, products, etc. Once implemented, high adoption in a short time frame shows that users are waiting for more convenient authentication.  The reduced authentication time and increased authentication success rate show the effectiveness of our solution for the user experience. Intuit and T-Mobile have shared publicly that they view the investment in our platform as a top line initiative -- a business enabler. Additionally, the reduced operational have delivered a significant ROI.  Our solution is now the most broadly used FIDO-based consumer authentication solution. Our expertise and real-world experience sets us apart in delivering a game-changing approach to authentication./p

Shining Moment

pOur idea to fundamentally change authentication with a new architecture designed for the digital world is now adopted by the industry.  When the W3C promoted the WebAuthn spec to “recommendation” status earlier this year, it signaled the full adoption of FIDO by the eco-system -- a proud moment for us.  We are especially proud that the thought leaders who invested in our platform early-on are proud of their decision, and realizing quantifiable benefits./p